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THE CONTEMPORARY 
AMERICAN POET SERIES 

EDITORS : William Stanley Braithwaite 
Joseph Lebowich 



The Contemporary 
American Poet Series 

George Edward Woodberry 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 
Bliss Carman 

Josephine Preston Peabody 
James Oppenheim 
Anna Hempstead Branch 
George Sterling 
Edgar Lee Masters 
Amy Lowell 
Richard Le Gallienne 
Robert Frost 
Percy Mackaye 

The Poetry Review Company 

12 Chauncy Street 
CAMBRIDGE :: :: MASSACHUSETTS 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

A STUDY OF HIS POETRY 




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George Edward Woodberry 

A Study of his Poetry 



By 
Louis V. Ledoux 



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The Poetry Review Company 

Cambridge, Massachusetts 
1917 








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COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY LOUIS V. LEDOUX 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published March, 1917 



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BY LOUIS V. LEDOUX 






GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 

THE STORY OF ELEUSIS 

YZDRA 

THE SHADOW OF iETNA 

ETC. 



CONTENTS 




Chapter I . . . . 


13 


Chapter II . . . . 


19 


Chapter III . . . . 


33 


Chapter IV ....:, 


44 


Chapter V . . . . 


5i 


Bibliography . . . . 


57 



CHAPTER I. 

I. 

George Edward Woodberry, whose ancestors, com- 
ing from English Devon, had been among the first 
settlers of Beverly, Massachusetts, was born there in 
the family home facing the sea, on May 12, 1855 ; the 
son of Henry Elliott and Sarah Dane (Tuck) Wood- 
berry. The New England tradition was his birth- 
right ; and the love of the sea, for many of his people 
had been sea-faring folk, and his boyhood was passed 
where the sea-interest is greater than that of the land. 
Inherited associations and habits of thought form the 
background of any writer's work, whether he be a 
carrier on of the tradition in which he was bred or in 
revolt against it; and any estimate of Mr. Wood- 
berry's poetry must take into account the stem from 
which it sprang, the roots deep in the New England- 
ism of other days and the New England sap which, as 
his spiritual vision widened, gave something of its own 
character to the half-exotic blossoms of his later verse. 

The chronicles of The North Shore — that most 
beautiful part of Massachusetts which lies between 
Boston and Cape Ann — are full of the doings of the 
Woodberry family. John Woodberry, who came to 
Salem in 1626 and was an original member of the first 
church there, was, with his brother William, among 
the four who first established a permanent settlement 
at Beverly. In 1635 he was granted a farm of two 
hundred acres and it is likely that he or his son was 
one of the interested petitioners who requested a few 
years later that the name of the settlement be changed 
for reasons of which "the first is the great dislike and 

[13] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

discontent of many of our people for this name of 
Beverly, because (we being but a small place) it has 
caused on us a constant nickname of Beggarly, being 
in the mouths of many." They seem to have been a 
godly lot — these Woodberrys — founders and deacons 
of churches ; men who were ready to fight and die for 
their country when the need came, and in their daily 
lives had to do with the sea, building ships and trading. 
Of such a stock the poet came ; the love of the sea is in 
his verse — the color and sound of it — with the New 
England sense of spiritual and moral values, the New 
England seriousness, and passion for things of the soul. 
After a boyhood spent in Beverly wandering among 
the fields in search of flowers or drifting day-long on 
the bay, Mr. Woodberry went up to Harvard, leaving, 
it would seem, among his school-fellows at Exeter 
where he had early identified himself with the literary 
life, the reputation of a poet. At Harvard, Lowell and 
Charles Eliot Norton quickly discerned the promise of 
the lad and it is said that the former kept a room at 
his house where young Woodberry would be welcome 
when he wished to come. The class oration which he 
prepared for graduation was not delivered because 
certain members of the faculty feared that it might 
be misinterpreted by the more conservative part of 
the audience, but was privately printed by the Signet 
Society in an edition of thirty copies; and The Rela- 
tion of Pallas Athene to Athens has become the first 
of those scarce little pamphlets now eagerly sought by 
collectors. Graduation from Harvard in 1877 was fol- 
lowed by some years of teaching in the University of 
Nebraska, of wandering in Southern Europe, of re- 
viewing and editing, with occasional creative work in 
prose or in verse. In 1891 Mr. Woodberry was 
called to Columbia University where he remained for 

[14] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

more than a decade as head of the department of 
Comparative Literature, winning among the students 
friends whose continued and peculiar devotion, illus- 
trated by the recent formation of a society to foster 
his ideals in American life, testifies to his power as a 
teacher and his unique influence as an inspiration to 
the young. Since leaving Columbia, he has made his 
home at Beverly, not connected with any institution 
but giving occasional courses of lectures at various 
universities, and spending much of his time in that 
Mediterranean world — Southern Italy and Sicily, 
North Africa, Greece and Asia Minor — whose culture 
has been a vitally important element in his thought and 
in his work. 

Mr. Woodberry has received many academic honors, 
and has written a number of distinguished prose books 
which rank with the finest of modern interpretative 
criticism ; but the work that has probably meant most 
to him, and will probably mean most to his readers, is 
that which the present study is designed to treat, his 
verse. 

II. 

The most constant characteristics of Mr. Wood- 
berry's poetry are its insistence upon spiritual values 
and its passionateness — the intensity of the emotion it 
seeks to express. His poems, except for a few occa- 
sional pieces, seem the record of passionate hope, of 
passionately cherished ideals, of disappointment or 
disillusion passionately felt, and, in some of his later 
work, of convictions passionately held. He burns with 
that intensity of emotion which is characteristic of 
the creative artist; but in him the object of passion is 
two-fold — tragic opposites which are in perpetual con- 
flict. One — the white horse of the Phaedrus — is the 
yearning,. intense desire to remain perpetually in the 

[15] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

ideal, spiritual world, to realize it in life, to bring it 
to others; its opposite is an almost equal devotion to 
aspects of the world of sense, an ecstatic appreciation 
of color and fragrance, with a fineness of perception 
and rendering in the light effects that suggests Turner 
or Shelley. His poems glow with color. Superficially 
he is the poet of light, but considering more deeply, 
one gets the impression of a man who had seen among 
dark tree-trunks a fitful gleaming of the Grail, and, 
having given himself wholly, passionately to the quest, 
is unmindful of all save the fleeting vision and the 
unattainment. The ideal world is one in which many 
spiritually gifted people have taken holiday; to some 
it seems like home, but there are none who live there, 
for its children are exiles. A passionate devotion to 
the things of the spirit, an intense delight in visible 
beauty ; these are the constant elements in Mr. Wood- 
berry's poetry; the one was fostered in him by his 
New England heritage, the other came perhaps, as it 
has come to so many Northern poets, a gift of the 
Mediterranean world. One gives to his work a back- 
ground of sad nobility, the other the warmth and color 
of life ; but to Mr. Woodberry the two seem forces in 
irreconcilable conflict, the world that we call "real" 
with the world that we call "ideal". 

Italy, like a dream, 

Unfolds before my eyes; 
But another fairer dream 

Behind me lies; 
Could I turn from the dream that is 

To where that first light flies — 
Could I turn from the dream that was — 

In a dream life dies! 



[16 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

One masters the spirit of life 

Through love of life to be; 
I am not master, O Love, — 

Thou slay est the will in me! 
Give me the dream that is, — 

Earth like heaven to see; 
Or grant the dream that was, — 

Love's immortality ! 

The beauty that is seen lies open to many; the 
beauty that is "unseen'' is visible only to a few, and to 
them merely in momentary glimpses as though a veil 
had been suddenly lifted to drop as suddenly again. 
Literature records many of these moments of vision, 
and the sadness of English poetry has largely to do 
with their passing ; for while most in their youth have 
had glimpses of the ideal world, it has a way of mark- 
ing for its own those who are specially endowed, and 
these, driven onward by an inner necessity follow the 
gleam among the obstacles of life, through continued 
unattainment to what should be, but is not always, a 
final disillusion; learning that in the world we know 
the wings of the spirit can never be wholly free. 
Many poets, especially those whose habit of mind fitted 
them to receive the Platonic idealism, have treated 
the subject, but in the work of only a few is the 
record of the vision and its passing, the quest, the 
disillusion, so preeminent a part as it is in Mr. Wood- 
berry's. This is the golden thread which a critic must 
follow in order to find the spiritual and the poetic 
value of the work under consideration ; the technique, 
and that glow of color in the pages which makes many 
of the poems seem as though they had been bathed in 
light, are less important subjects of discussion, though 
all are correlated and work together to produce the 
total effect. 

[17] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
III. 

Another trait which is obvious in Mr. Woodberry's 
work, and which it may be as well to examine before 
following our golden thread, is the growing externality 
of his interests. The early poems, as is natural, are 
chiefly concerned with the individual, the moods of 
the soul and its reactions; but through them there 
runs a desire to be of service to the race, a conviction 
of destiny that will make the personal soul an active 
agent in bringing a better world. In considering Mr. 
Woodberry's poetry chronologically this thought is 
seen to develop until the chief interest is outside of the 
individual who comes finally to be conceived as merely 
a part of a whole — a single pulsation in the rhythm of 
the universe, rather than as an entity self -bounded and 
self-sufficient. The change is paralleled by a growth 
from purely personal feeling for New England and 
that older England from which it sprang, through the 
Americanism of My Country and certain of the son- 
nets, to an enthusiasm for what might be called world- 
citizenship without nationality; a conviction of abso- 
lute equality and brotherhood that leads to an almost 
Franciscan devotion to the outcast and the humble. 
This is part of the working out of a philosophy, of the 
reaction of life itself upon the ideal of life, and will 
be discussed later ; now it is time to turn to the poems 
themselves. 



[18] 



CHAPTER II. 

I. 

The volume of collected poems which was pub- 
lished in 1903 contains most of the pieces which had 
appeared in two earlier books and a number which had 
not previously been published in book form. Near 
the front of this volume is an early poem which Mr. 
Woodberry has referred to elsewhere as the "cry of 
dying boyhood," and which, though it is not so uni- 
formly felicitous in expression as some others, shows 
clearly through images of the northern lights the 
poetic mood we have attempted to describe. Like the 
false dawn of those flashing lights is the dream in the 
heart of a boy, youth's aspiration toward the ideal 
world, youth's glowing trust in the things of the spirit ; 
and like it also is the subsequent disillusion when the 
young soul perceives by the dying glow of its own fire 
the broken dreams and hopes which were the sword 
and shield of its chivalry. When youth lies wounded, 
it does not know that wounds may heal, and the poem 
is a poem of youth, true to the mood and repetitive of 
an ancient cry. 

False Dawn. 

God dreamt a dream ere the morning woke 

Or ever the stars sang out; 
The glory, although it never broke, 
Filled heaven zvith a golden shout; 

And zvhen in the North there's a quiver and beam 
Of mystical lights that heavenward stream, 
The heart of a boy will dream God's dream. 

[19] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

O Norns, who sit by the pale sea's capes, 

Loosen the wonderful shine! 
The glamour of God hath a thousand shapes 
And every one divine. 

Dartle and listen' o'er the blue height; 
Drift and shimmer, flight on flight; 
The heart of a boy is God's delight. 

O, clamber and weave with the Milky Way 

The Rose in the East that sprang, 
From star to star, with blossom and spray, 
On heaven's gates to hang! 

O Vine of the Morning, cling and climb, 

Till the stars like birds in your branches chime! 

The heart of a boy is God's springtime. 

'Tis dawn that shadows the glowing roof! 

'Tis Light with the Dragon strives! 
Ah, Night's black warp with the rainbow-woof 
The shuttle of Destiny drives. 

They swerve and falter, gather and fly, 
Wane, and shiver, and slip from the sky — 
O Norns, is the heart of a boy God's lie? 

Childless Ones, would your blind charms 

Might seal our darling's eyes! 
Dead, zvith the dead Dawn in his arms, 
In the pale north Light lies. 

Glimmer and glint, fallen fire! 
The lights of heaven like ghosts expire; 
The heart of a boy is God's desire. 
[20] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

O dream God dreamt ere the morning woke 

Or ever the stars sang out; 
O glory diviner than ever broke, 

Of the false, false dawn the shout! 
False dawn, false dawn, false dawn — 

Alas, when God shall wake! 
False dawn, false dawn, false dawn — 

Alas, our young mistake! 
False dawn, false dawn, false dawn — 

heart betrayed, break, break! 

It may be said in passing that Mr. Woodberry seems 
always to have had a special feeling for youth. His 
books contain a little gallery of portraits of children — 
the child who touched him in the city street, the Ionian 
boy, the orphans found wandering at Delphi, and a 
whole row of young Sicilians, all of whom are seen so 
vividly against their backgrounds as to suggest an un- 
usual sense of contour and color in the author. 

Boy on the almond bough, 

Clinging against the wind, 
A- sway from foot to brow, 

With the emerald sea behind; — 

Could a picture be painted more deftly? Obviously 
the man who writes such lines as these has a feeling 
for children; and in his treatment of them there are 
notes of reverence and of sadness, a somewhat 
Platonic or Wordsworthian reverence for the young 
heart in which the golden dream still lives, and the 
sadness of one who, resting his hand on a child's head, 
thinks of the lessons that must be learned, the griefs 
that must be endured. 

[21] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
II. 

Something of Mr. Woodberry's own youth, of value 
to us because its moods are a part of common ex- 
perience, can be seen in The North Shore Watch, an 
elegy for the friend with whom much of his boyhood at 
Beverly had been passed. The poem was first printed 
(in a subscription edition of two hundred copies) 
while the poet was still in his twenties, but it is one 
that has been given high praise and that shows with 
his native idealism that colorfulness of expression, 
that sense of sea-backgrounds, which have been noted 
as among the external characteristics of his work. 
It is typical of the poetry of youth with its references 
to field excursions and to boating, its sense of intimate 
comradeship with nature, its exaltation of friendship, 
and in the poignancy of its grief for the loss of one 
who was 

First dead of all my dead that are to be. 

Young also in its idealism and in its recoil at the reve- 
lation of phases of life first revealed at the close of 
boyhood, the poem moves forward through a succes- 
sion of sea-pictures and glimpses of the pine-hung 
Northern Shore, seen at dawn or sunset when "pools 
of opal gem the windless bay," or when, wrapped in 
more mysterious umbrage, 

» . . the dark pines, whose heart is like the sea's, 
Mourn for one darling flower they nurtured here. 

The solution of the poem is Shelleyean: Through 
love "we look toward life with conquering eyes" ; and 
in it is expressed a faith in the endurance of Beauty, 
a conviction of the things that are seen being merely 

[22] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

temporal, and those that are unseen eternal, which, 
though with many it is a passing mood of youth illus- 
trating the natural affinity between the young soul and 
the doctrines of Platonic idealism, is in Mr. Wood- 
berry the first expression of a belief passionately held 
or clung to with passionate regret. The North Shore 
Watch is a poem of youth, young in its idealism and 
in its melancholy; and it is one to which the heart 
of youth makes quick response — a twilight thing with 
the colors of the north in it, untouched as yet by 
Mediterranean splendor, though already reaching out 
in imagination to that more vivid eastern world where 
the friend for whom the poet mourns had gone in 
the glow of his own youth and found darkness. 

What though o'er him the tropic sunset bloom, 
With hyacinthine hues and sanguine dyes, 

And down the central deep's profoundest gloom 
Soft blossoms, fallen from the wreathed skies, 
The seas imparadise? 

With light immingling, colors, dipped in May, 
Through multitudinous changes still endure — 
Orange and unimagined emeralds pure 
Drift through the softened day; 

"Alas'' he zvhispers, "and art thou not nigh? 

Earth reaches now her height of beauty ere I die." 

Extended quotation is unnecessary, but the stanzas 
which lead to the final landscape pictures may be given 
as expressing the intellectual conclusions of the poem 
and as sufficiently illustrative of the verse movement: 

Beauty abides, nor suffers mortal change, 
Eternal refuge of the orphaned mind; 
Where'er a lonely wanderer, I range, 

[23 1 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

The tender flowers shall my woes unbind, 
The grass to me be kind; 
And lovely shapes innumerable shall throng 
On sea and prairie, soft as children's eyes; 
Morn shall awake me with her glad surprise; 
The stars shall hear my song ; 
And heaven shall I see, whatever my road, 
Steadfast, eternal, life's impregnable abode. 

Love, too, abides, and smiles at savage death, 

And swifter speeds his might and shall endure; 
The secret flame, the unimagined breath, 
That lives in all things beautiful and pure, 
Invincibly secure; 
In Him creation hath its glorious birth, 
Subsists, rejoices, moves prophetic on, 
Till that dim goal of all things shall be won 

Men yearn for through the earth; 
Voices that pass we are of Him, the Song, 
Whose harmonies the winds, the stars, the seas, pro- 
long. 

III. 

Agathon, a dramatic poem first published in the 
volume of 1890, but privately printed before that by 
some of his devoted students at the University of 
Nebraska, is Mr. Woodberry's first extended treat- 
ment of the theme that has haunted him life-long, — 
the conflict in the soul between love of the beauty 
that is perceived by the senses and that which is 
perceived by the spirit, youth's final rejection of 
what is transient, and definite self -consecration to the 
ideal, despite the earthly hopelessness of such service: 

The love that mates with heaven weds in the grave. 

[24] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

This poem takes us at once into the heart of philo- 
sophic idealism; it expresses a definite philosophy of 
life, and while with many poets criticism could confine 
itself mainly to the pointing out of external poetic 
excellencies — the beauties of phrase and music — in 
Mr. Woodberry's work the intellectual and spiritual 
elements are so important that more attention must 
be given to what he has to say than to how he says it. 
When the subject matter of poetry is essentially poetic 
the manner of its expression takes immediately its 
proper place of secondary importance. Mr. Wood- 
berry has the technical mastery of his art, and, what 
is far more, he has that peculiar ability to make 
magical haunting phrases, lines that remain in the 
memory ; to evoke pictures with a word, to illumine 
by sudden flashes of insight, which is essential to 
poetry. 

The deeper elements in such a poem as Agathon give 
expression to thoughts and experiences which, though 
usually realized less intensely, are common to the more 
sensitive natures among mankind, and make a direct 
human appeal, recalling to the reader his own past 
phases of consciousness when life was all ahead and 
the soul stood confident in unstained armor. Looked 
back to, there is pathos about these moods — the pathos 
of Richard II. deposed by Bolingbroke. The percep- 
tion of impermanence in the world, the decay of love, 
the fading of beauty, is that which often enough gives 
the first rude shock of awakening; the world we knew 
or thought we knew is gone, and in its stead is a 
universe in which life is but a dream in the night of 
death, a moment's glow in the northern sky ; beauty 
a malign phase of transitoriness and love an emblem 
of mockery. The virgin arms are stained, and after 
their first defeat few are able to see again the gleaming 

[25] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

of the Grail. Most are absorbed, during the later 
years, by the daily routine of life, seeing only what 
is about them, desiring only the things of this world; 
"but some whose eyes were more divinely touched" 
carry with them to the end a sense of exile, a nos- 
talgia for the land across whose borders the eyes of 
boyhood looked when mists closed in and the vision 
was blotted from all but memory. For such, the clouds 
are occasionally lifted, and for them the value of life 
lies wholly in the frequency and duration of the 
moments of vision when the soul feels its wings, and, 
in the radiance of the eternal, sees once more a world 
of permanence and of spiritual values — an ideal world 
which is realized to be of greater actuality than the 
transitory phenomena perceived daily by the senses. 
It is only the ideal that has actual reality. 

The machinery of the poem, which is simple enough 
to one who has even a rudimentary knowledge of 
Platonic thought and imagery, is lucidly explained in 
the Argument, but the peculiar success of it is that a 
poem so burdened with philosophic meaning is never 
overweighted. It has the glow of spring upon it — a 
richer spring turning to summer; it expresses the 
nobility of youth — such youth Plato must have had 
when he walked with his master, or as, when death 
had claimed him, his friends thought of in Sir Philip 
Sidney — clear-eyed and familiar with the stars. It 
has the same lovely landscapes, though here they are 
of the Mediterranean world, but it has a richer music 
than that of The North Shore Watch, a greater power 
of verbal evocation, a more mature technique and mas- 
tery of line and phrase. There are many things in 
Agathon which have not been touched on in this brief 
resume, much observation of life, much wisdom ; but, 
like its predecessor, it is a subjective, what might be 

[26] 



GEORGE EDWARD W O O D B E R R Y 

called a centripetal poem, the author's interest being 
still drawn inward, and directed mainly toward the 
relation between the individual and the universe, or 
rather toward the effect of the universe on the person. 
Only in his later work does the interest broaden until 
individual experience is seen merely as a pulsation in 
the eternal rhythm — a falling wave which though dis- 
tinguishable for a moment, lives only as part of an 
infinite whole, a manifestation of something greater 
than itself. 

IV. 

The group of lyrics gathered together under the 
collective title of Wild Eden and first published in 
1899 form a distinctly different part of the volume 
under consideration and represent to many the height 
of Mr. Woodberry's achievement. Wild Eden is the 
poet's tribute to the beauty of the earth. In these 
lyrics, the two opposing forces which the first quoted 
poem described as in conflict, seem to have ceased for 
a time contending for the poet's allegiance; the love 
of the beauty that is seen fills and satisfies him, what 
might be called his ascetism appearing only in occa- 
sional moods of regret or self-reproach. In the main 
they are exquisite love-poems, almost touching in their 
tenderness and spirituality; or nature-poems written 
by one who knows whereof he speaks and who has 
loved the out-of-doors in all weathers : The bat and 
the humming bird are dear to him; he has watched 
devotedly through sunlit, musing hours the bees in 
the linden's bloom, the garden flowers ; he has known 
the exhilaration of the storm and reveled in the might 
of the sea. 

The daily aspects of nature come to Mr. Wood- 
berry with the vividness of a revelation; he brings 
that emotional intensity which has been noted as a 

[27] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

characteristic, to all that he feels or sees, and the 
lyrics seem to spring spontaneously from his lips as 
though the emotion that was in him forced him to 
find unpremeditated relief in the creative act. 

A voice in the roaring pine wood, 

A voice in the breaking sea, 
A voice in the storm-red morning, 

That will not let me be. 

Might in the pine wood tossing, 

Might on the racing sea, 
The Weather-spirit, my brother, 

Is calling, calling to me. 

These are not the words of a mystic or of one who 
has given himself wholly to the far glimmer of the 
Grail. 

The love-poems have the charm and color of slow 
twilights, the delicacy of April, they are not things of 
the summer noon ; and it would be difficult to repre- 
sent them by quotation, for their effect is cumulative 
like that which comes through praying generations to 
a cathedral, giving in the end a sense of spiritual pres- 
ence there. Some of them leave an impression of alle- 
gorical significance as though the Maiden described 
were, like the Lady of Shelley's Sensitive Plant, an 
incarnation of the ideal; but most are direct enough 
and one will serve as well as another to give the type. 

The Rose. 
O love's star over Eden, 

How pale and faint thou art! 
Now lost, now seen above, 

Thy white rays point and dart. 

[28] 



GEORGE EDWARD W D B E R R Y 

O, liquid o'er her move, 

Shine out and take my part! 
I have sent her the rose of love, 

And shut in the rose is my heart. 

The fireflies glitter and rush 

In the dark of the summer mead; 
Pale on the hawthorn bush, 

Bright on the larkspur seed; 
And long is heaven aflush 

To give my rose god-speed; 
If she breathe a kiss, it will blush; 

If she bruise a leaf, it will bleed. • 

O bright star over Eden, 

All beautiful thou art; 
To-day, in the rose, the rose, 

For my love I have perilled my heart; 
Now, ere the dying glozvs 

From the placid isles depart, 
The rose-bathed planet knows 

It is hers, my rose, my heart! 

No matter how rapt the poet's delight in the things 
of earth may be, the sense of their transitoriness, the 
perception of that eternal world whose beauty fades 
not, neither passes away, is never long in abeyance. 
Even in Wild Eden it comes on him occasionally and 
one other poem from the group must be quoted, partly 
because it shows curiously the sense of the eternal 
coming in the midst of an ecstatic appreciation of 
the temporal — the two being not in conflict, but the 
one, as it were, a means of ascent to the other — and 
partly because it illustrates, if our theory be correct, 
that gift which his Mediterranean experiences gave 

[29] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

the author. The poem is luminous; it is bathed in 
light and color — the color of Sorolla, not of Corot — 
and its climax in the word "incandescent" is one that 
no other writer would have been apt to reach with 
such telling effectiveness. The landscape, which prob- 
ably to the poet was of New England, suggests rather 
to the reader some garden above Naples on a sum- 
mer noon ; it has the glow and color of the South, the 
light in which sculpture should be seen and which has 
made the sculptor's art a southern one as that of the 
painter is northern. In its thought as in its picture, 
this poem is peculiarly characteristic of Mr. Wood- 
bery. 

The Rose Bower. 
A crimson bower the garden glows, 
In overhanging noon, intense and bare, 
Enisled and bathed in silence and repose, 
As it were mirrored on the azure air; 
All molten lies the faint blue-shimmering deep, 
Impalpably transparent, smooth with light; 
Far in the fragrant pines the hot winds sleep; 
And nothing moves, and all dark things are bright. 
Yet is this fair round of tranquillity, 
This swathe of color, wheresoever it be, 
The burning shell of elemental strife; 
And never yet so fleeting seemed sweet life; 
So fragile this thin film of human eyes, 
In whose slight orb are springtime and sunrise; 
So perishable this incandescent frame, 
Lone Nature's inextinguishable pyre 
Of transitory loveliness and bliss, — 
This undulating and eternal flame 
Of beauty burning in its perfumed fire, 
And passion dying in its tropic kiss. . 

[30] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

Even nozv the sweet-hued vision sinks away, 
And from these bathing flames of night and day, 
As in my hour to come it soon may seem 
When fades to ashes earth's majestic dream, 
My soul springs up erect, alone, supreme, 
And, passing from this glory, doth survey, 
As some spent meteor's low and dying gleam, 
This radiant life that burns all else away, 
Consuming its own star; a moment, where 
About my feet morning and evening flare, 
My spirit gazes, still a stranger there, 
On this dear human home, so sweet, so fair, 
Nor yet unfolds aloft eternal wings. 
Then slowly lapsing into sensuous things, 
Once more do I inhale this glorious light, 
Breathe the soft air and feel the flowering earth, 
And on me comes the everlasting sea, 
Purple horizons, emerald-hanging woods, 
The rose bower, and love's blissful solitudes, 
Where voices of eternity 
Have wandered from my birth, 
And nothing save love's mystery 
Shines with immortal worth. 

V. 
Beside The North Shore Watch, Agathon, the Wild 
Eden lyrics and the two others which have been 
quoted, the volume under consideration contains a 
number of miscellaneous poems, some of which were 
written for occasions such as the Emerson Centenary 
Service, and the memorial to the author's friend, 
Edwin Booth. Many of these — particularly the patri- 
otic sonnets — are very fine, but some seem rather 
perfunctory and uninspired. None need detain us 
here. Mr. Woodberry is a poet of the inspirational 
type; the effectiveness of his work is largely de- 

[31] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

pendent upon the complete fusion of the emotional 
and intellectual elements that are in him, and upon the 
apparent spontaneity with which he sets down what 
an inner necessity seems to compel him to express; 
when the fusion is less than perfect or when expres- 
sion is compelled by an external rather than an inward 
necessity the resulting product loses in poetic quality. 
He would have made a poor laureate. 

Up to this period of his career, Mr. Woodberry 
was of the nineteenth century; his work, at least in 
externals, being a last, late bloom of that summer 
which had produced Tennyson, Arnold and Swin- 
burne, though in his habits of mind he seemed more 
nearly akin, among English poets, to Wordsworth and 
Shelley. The publication of the collected volume of 
1903 was followed by some years of poetic silence and 
when Mr. Woodberry spoke again he used a new 
language. The thought in his earlier work has de- 
veloped rather than changed its direction, the emo- 
tional element has merely grown more intense, but 
in externals his later poetry is as distinctly of the 
twentieth century as the earlier is of the century that 
has passed. That which is of importance in the work 
of any poet, all that gives it its essential value, is inde- 
pendent of time and place, as true to New York as 
to Athens, to the twentieth century as to the first; 
and it does not matter when or where or how a poem 
was written ; only the garment of poetry changes, only 
the fashion and semblance of it; and this is a fact 
which must never be forgotten. The essential human 
problems and experiences are what they were two 
thousand years ago, and the sea comes to the shore 
exactly as it did when Homer knew it. The manner 
of a poem may be of the twentieth century or of the 
renaissance, the matter of it, if it be a good poem, 
is eternal. 

[32] 



CHAPTER III. 

I. 

The Flight and Other Poems, a collection of about 
fifty new pieces, none of which is very long, was pub- 
lished in 1914 after an interval of eleven years. The 
intellectual content of many of these poems, and Mr. 
Woodberry delivers his message with earnest convic- 
tion of its truth, is based not on reason but in faith, 
and apparently is derived from a series of intuitive 
glimpses into the heart of the universe that are like 
the moments of illumination with which the records of 
mysticism abound. He likewise shows himself en- 
dowed with a faculty which might be called "cosmic 
consciousness/' a perception through feeling or intui- 
tion of the intimate unity of life in all its manifesta- 
tions and without regard to sequence in time. If we 
read him correctly, each personal soul is merely a 
manifestation of the race-soul, and consequently all 
are essentially equal. It is the poignant realization 
of this absolute equality and brotherhood of men, 
whatever may be the accidents of time and circum- 
stance, that kindles many of these poems ; and as 
the life-spirit itself is eternal the message of the book 
is one of passionate hope and joy. We can afford to 
forget our mistakes, to forget the actual pathos and 
tragedy of life, for we are only at the beginning; 
eternity is before us, we must spend no time in mourn- 
ing or repentance, but must look forward; and the 
poet is raised to ecstasy in contemplation of the youth 
and hope with which the universe is instinct. The 
stars above the desert sing to him : 

[33] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

"We sit in our burning spheres 
inimitably hung; 
By the speed of light we measure the years 
On purple ether flung; 

Without a shadow time appears, 
A calendar of echoing lights 
That flame and dusk from depths and heights, 
And all our years are young. 

"We gaze on the far flood flowing 
Unimaginably free, 
Multitudinous, mystical, glowing, 
But all we do not see; 

And a rapture is all our knowing, 
That on fiery nerves comes stealing, 
An intimate revealing 
That all is yet to be." 

Much of Mr. Woodberry's poetry, as was suggested 
above, is the record of a passionate search of the soul 
for satisfaction, and in the book now under considera- 
tion there are many descriptions of the quest. For- 
tunately, the author's utterances are nothing if not dis- 
tinct, and we can summarize briefly : The pursuit of 
beauty leads nowhere, and duty, which is ordinary 
morality, fails to give satisfaction; these things are 
of the earth, earthy. Learning and wealth, as the 
Poverello of Assisi taught long ago, are the fetters 
of the soul and must be set aside with all other 
conventional standards, for complete spiritual free- 
dom is essential to self-realization. It is only by mak- 
ing the brotherhood of man a standard of action 
rather than a merely theoretic creed ; by feeling pas- 
sionately the absolute equality of all men as sharers 
in the race-spirit; by forgetting our conventional 

[34] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

values and going as their peer among the lowly and 
the outcast, as St. Francis did, that we can satisfy 
the soul by bringing it once more into harmony with 
that which is eternal and essential. There are many 
lyrics about children, for children are spiritually free. 

By no means all of the poems in the collection are 
burdened with the meanings that have been outlined 
above. Many present their moods simply ; but even 
the ones most heavily freighted with philosophic or 
humanitarian ideas are saved from the slightest ap- 
pearance of didacticism by the close fusion of the 
intellectual element with that strong emotion which 
is the basis of each and all. The settings are of the 
Mediterranean world, in Greece or Italy, Sicily or 
North Africa, and many of the poems have that glow 
of color which is characteristic of their author's work. 

As poetry the simpler pieces are perhaps the more 
successful, for in some of the others the author is 
so filled with what he wishes to express that he occa- 
sionally forgets his artistry; such poems lack the ex- 
ternal poetic graces and impress the reader rather as 
spontaneous outpourings than as the expression of ar- 
tistically controlled emotion — as Dionysiac rather than 
Apollonian forms of art — but there is a strange power 
in them all, a vividness of imagination and intensity 
of emotion that make the book, whether one likes it 
or not, unique. The volume is divided into three sec- 
tions, the third of which, though it contains much 
charming verse, need not concern us greatly, the first 
two being of far more importance to such a study 
as this. 

II. 

The first part of the 1914 volume contains, beside 
the poems descriptive of North Africa many of which 
are based on that perception which has been spoken 

[35] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

of as "cosmic consciousness/' and some of which are 
certainly as fine as anything in the book, the philo- 
sophic poems, a general idea of which has already 
been given. From these the tone of the whole volume 
is derived and to them the golden thread which we 
have followed leads. They give further record of 
that quest, that search for a realization of the eternal 
in the temporal, to which the poet has devoted him- 
self, but they seem also to record an actual attainment. 
In his earlier work he was — to use a wholly irrelevant 
image — like a man who being lost at night desires 
very earnestly to reach home but has no idea of how 
to get there ; now he has found the way. It is not 
a New England lane; nor is it a path liable to 
grow dusty with much travel, for he who would walk 
therein must first set aside all conventions, deny aes- 
thetic and moral values, — Hebraism and Hellenism — 
the appreciation of beauty in the ordinary meanings 
of the word, and that sense of duty which is a tradi- 
tional inheritance and frequently has no basis in rea- 
son. To him who has discarded all these and finds 
himself without trammels, both mentally and spirit- 
ually free, the path is short and leads to that "King- 
dom of All-Souls" where men are realized to be in 
absolute equality, and democracy reaches its logical 
conclusion. Although to the few this path is a way of 
salvation, it is one that it might be unwise for many 
to follow; but the philosophic conception, which is 
somewhat Nietzchean as well as somewhat Franciscan, 
is, in a man of Mr. Woodberry's preeminent spirit- 
uality, one of peculiar nobility and loftiness. The au- 
thor's command of technique is illustrated by the fact 
that he has expressed his ideas in lyrical stanzas of 
perfect lucidity that contain many elements of pic- 
torial and poetic value. 

[36] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

We were past the good and the evil, 

In the spirit's uttermost dark; 
He is neither god nor devil 

For whom my heart-beats hark; 
And I leaned my cheek to my horse's neck, 

And I sang to his ear in the dark: 
"There is neither good nor evil, 
There is neither god nor devil, 

And our way lies on through the dark. 

"I have never heard it or learnt it, 

It is in me like my soul, 
And the sights of this world have burnt it 

In me to a living coal, — 
The soul of man is a masterless thing 

And bides not another's control; 
And gypsy-broods of bandit-loins 
Shall teach what the lawless life enjoins 

Upon the lawless soul. 

"When we dare neither to loose nor to bind, 

However to us things appear; 
When whatsoever in others we find, 

We shall feel neither shame nor fear; 
When we learn that to love the lowliest 

We must first salute him our peer; 
When the basest is most our brother, 
And we neither look down on nor up to another, — 

The end of our ride shall be near." 

There can be little doubt of the fact that vast revo- 
lutionary forces are at work casting the race in some 
new social mould and it is the coming of this new 
order — for him the entrance into that Kingdom of All- 
Souls which is beyond the realm of the sensual and 

[37] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

above that of the moral law — that Mr. Woodberry 
hails in stanzas which seem based on passionate, pro- 
phetic conviction rather than on that vague hope of an 
unvisualized millenium which has given a subject to 
so many poets. The motive is one long familiar to 
poetry; but the method of its working out in the 
intellect and the characteristic intensity of its treat- 
ment are peculiar to Mr. Woodberry. The Way, and 
Beyond Good and Evil are more successful in the 
poetic presentation of these ideas than is the poem 
entitled The Kingdom of All-Souls, which is printed 
first in the volume. All grew out of New England, 
much as the French Revolution grew out of the ancien 
regime, or Wilde's comedies from the conservatism of 
the Victorian era ; but they could not have been writ- 
ten by a poet who had spent his days looking out on 
Beverly from his study window, or by one who had 
come into less intimate contact than has Mr. Wood- 
berry with other lives in other lands. It is the human 
touch, the humanity in him, that turns a theory of life 
into a living force. 

III. 
The North African pieces in this section of the 
book take their rise in the poet's Mediterranean wan- 
derings which brought to his native New Englandism, 
with the color of the South, the background of a world 
older in experience. They illustrate better than any 
others what has been said regarding his deepening 
sense of the impermanence of the individual, the con- 
tinuity of life. There are mysterious elements in man 
— weird traces of atavism, perceptions of age-old wis- 
dom — to which some are sensitive and most are not. 
Seldom has this shadowland on the borders of con- 
sciousness, with its strange landscapes, been painted 
as Mr. Woodberry paints it here, and one must turn 

[38] 



GEORGE EDWARD W O O D B E R R Y 

to his prose book on North Africa to find again the 
mystery of the desert-world so subtly rendered and 
interpreted. 

These poems also show a persistent sense of dual 
personality, though not in the ordinary meaning of the 
term; it is as though the soul itself had a double ex- 
istence, as a separate entity — young and inexperienced 
— and as an emanation of the race-soul, endowed with 
race consciousness and memories, and at home in a 
world that is not subject to change though it expresses 
itself in transitory manifestations. Looked at from 
another point of view, this duality is that of the better 
and the lower natures in man, the untrammeled spirit 
and the part that is fettered by sense — again the horses 
of the Phaedrus. More will be said of this in connec- 
tion with The Roamer; but it is now clear that the 
golden thread we started to follow, however it may 
have changed its direction, has led on unbroken. A 
poem called The Riding is, unfortunately, too long to 
quote, and another must be made to do service in its 
place, though choice is difficult, as each of the shorter 
ones illustrates only a part of what has been said. 

The Revenant. 
It was at Tunis, in the shop. 
I told you of, where women stop, 
And falls the perfume, drop by drop, 

That first he came, 
Who in my own flesh clotheth him, 
And drugs my soul with memories dim, 
And fills my body to the brim, 

A perfumed flame. 

I know new meanings in the rose, 
Old channels in my sense unclose, 

[39] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

Along my nerves the music goes 

Of ancient time; 
And I am changed to what has been, — 
Silk-robed, and turbaned with the green, 
I try the thin edge damascene 

Of secret crime. 

To leaner sheaths my spirit shrinks, 
And long-forbidden pleasures drinks; 
The mindless life that never thinks, 

Crumbles my soul; 
And o'er the ruined yellow wall 
Of what I was, there groweth tall 
A flower, zvhose incense like a pall 

Doth round me roll. 

I hear a padding on the stones, 
There comes a terror in my bones, 
A throttling stills my crumpled moans 

And little cries; 
And who is he sits in my place, 
A lither soul, a softer grace, 
A lore of ages in his face, 

And world-wise eyes? 

The Revenant! in every clime 

He uses me to be the mime 

Of weird things acted in the time 

Of long ago; 
What mysteries of heart and brain, 
What forms of beauty, forms of pain, 
The sun shall never see again, 

Revive and glow! 



[40] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

A thousand years has he been clay 
Who from me takes the soul away, 
And in my body makes his play, 

Do what I can; 
Strange visitant, in myriad shapes, 
Who in myself my being apes! 
Ah, nowhere now my soul escapes 

The Ghost of Man. 

It is impossible to close this section without referring 
to Comrades, a poem which has perhaps been liked by 
more people than any other of Mr. Woodberry's re- 
cent pieces. It has the sadness inevitable to retro- 
spection and advancing age, for many comrades have 
departed and of those who survive each is absorbed 
by his own life, the close intimacies of youth being no 
longer possible in later years ; but it is a very human 
poem and as direct in its appeal as anything in the 
book. 

O love that passes the love of woman! 

Who that hath felt it shall ever forget, 
When the breath of life with a throb turns human, 

And a lad's heart is to a lad's heart set? 

Mr. Woodberry has a native talent for writing 
lyrics. 

IV. 

The second division of the volume takes us again 
to the Mediterranean world, but here instead of pic- 
turing the dancing girl of the desert, seen while 

With lids that doze in panther sleep 
Bedouins upon her motions keep 
Their couchant eyes . . . 

Mr. Woodberry shows us Italy and Sicily — lands of 

[41] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

sunlight peopled with singing youths and maidens — 
and Greece where sometimes children seen against 
gray ruins have the sadness of ages in their eyes. On 
the whole, however, it is a light-hearted part of the 
book ; the passion has burned itself out, the poet being 
contented to rest for a little in the sunlight, enjoying 
quietly what nature gives him, but ready to answer 
with quick response to any contact with her children. 
One feels in these poems the quality that has made 
the heart of youth turn to Mr. Woodberry himself 
with such unusual devotion — a quality that has made 
him, entirely apart from his writings, a power in the 
land — and fortunately for the critic most of them 
are of a kind about which nothing need be said in 
description or elucidation. In some — the beautiful 
stanzas on Proserpine, for example — the poet strikes 
a deeper note, but even in these the thought has the 
mellowness, the genial warmth of an October noon- 
tide, the author seeming to be in a mood of quiet 
acquiescence, accepting life as it is and willing to be 
warmed by the autumn sunlight, without revolt against 
the recognized imperfections of the order in which we 
live and without the tumult of unsatisfied aspiration. 
The poet in the land he loves and keenly responsive 
to all the beauty of it, 

From the silver tips of the olive tops 
To the silver edge of the sea, 

has come to accept impermanence, to see in decay 
evolution, in transitoriness the passing on of the 
"torch," — even to accept Death as something beautiful 
in itself and the possible opening of a doorway to new 
beauty, new things to be loved, fresh objects of desire. 
Mr. Woodberry has always been a great lover ; he has 
loved the sky and the sea, the Italian hillsides and 

[42] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

the Northern Shore, but most of all he has loved the 
heart of youth with its aspirations and its glimpses 
of the eternal. 

There is nothing, as was said above, in the third 
part of the 1914 collection which requires comment. 



[43] 



CHAPTER IV. 
I. 

The main part of this volume would end here were 
it not for The First Book of The Roamer, a fragment 
nearly one thousand lines long which was published 
in a magazine called "East and West," October, 1900. 
A few copies of this first book with a second added 
were privately printed in 1903, just as Mr. Wood- 
berry's years of silence commenced ; but the first alone 
can be considered here, as the second has not yet been 
made public, and the remaining ones, if they have 
been written, exist only in manuscript. The first book, 
however, demands a chapter by itself ; for beside the 
fact that probably upon The Roamer, if it is finished, 
a large part of the author's fame will ultimately rest; 
he seems to have concentrated in the part we have of 
it the finest of his thought, and to have put there cer- 
tainly as fine poetry as any that he has yet written. 

The poem, if the whole may be judged from a part, 
is an epic of the soul of man ; the epic conflict being 
between the higher and the lower natures. Apart from 
the machinery of the piece and its imaginary land- 
scape, The Roamer — and it must be clearly understood 
that only the first book is before us — might be called 
an autobiography of the spirit. It is a reasoned, or- 
derly account of the spiritual experiences that have 
been the motive of Mr. Woodberry's work from the 
beginning; it describes the early vision of an ideal, 
eternal world ; the consecration of the young soul to a 
realization of this in daily experience; the boy knight 
setting out upon his quest; the gathering of the 
powers of darkness bringing him the perception of his 

[44] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

own lower nature and of the evil of the world; his 
wounds and wavering and final determination to 
cleave to the ideal, though the cost may be the only- 
life we actually know, and though half the object of 
the quest — the desire to realize the eternal beauty so 
clearly that it can be brought to others as an element 
of vital significance in their lives — can never be at- 
tained. In its action the poem is of the "Alastor" 
type, but there is a stern gravity about it that suggests, 
rather, Lucretius or Dante; and Mr. Woodberry has 
put into the piece his own passionate earnestness. It 
is tempting to forecast from the introductory book the 
remaining course of the poem, but the part we have 
holds enough for our present attention; for beside 
the poetry — the splendid rhetoric of the pages — the 
thoughts suggested in it are of value as throwing much 
light upon a phase of human experience that is beyond 
the reach of most and has seldom been treated in Eng- 
lish poetry with so keen an intellectual appreciation. 
The poetic reactions of Wordsworth, to whom such 
experiences were familiar life-long, usually issued in 
quiet emotion; the intellectual element was seldom 
present and in the few poems where it does appear 
there is nothing of the penetrating, intense light of 
The Roamer. 

II. 

The difficulty of finding an old copy of a bygone 
magazine is considerable, and as most will be unable 
to read The Roamer for themselves until it is finished 
and published in some more accessible form, it be- 
comes necessary to follow the poem through in detail 
and to give ample quotations. 

The Roamer — or rather the fragment we have of it 
— is compact and therefore somewhat difficult to epito- 
mize, but it starts out clearly enough with the an- 

[45] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

nouncement of a double duality, that of the higher and 
lower natures, and that duality referred to above which 
makes the individual soul perceive that beside its own 
separate existence it lives as part of the race-soul — 
a vessel into which are poured for transmission race- 
ideals and racial traditions. It is through separate 
manifestations of the race-soul that the "torch" of 
Mr. Woodberry's prose works is handed on from gen- 
eration to generation and from one civilization to the 
next. The glowing invocation with which the poem 
opens is chiefly concerned with the race and the pos- 
sible realization of its long-delayed ideals through 
American democracy — an idea that was part of the 
purely American patriotism characteristic of this 
period of the author's development. The Roamer him- 
self — the protagonist of the poem — is imaged some- 
times as the higher nature — the eternal element in man 
— doomed to wander for awhile, an exile, in the desert 
of the world, and sometimes as the race-soul prisoned 
in the individual and fettered by the earthly elements 
with which it has been compounded. The distinctions 
between these two and the whole human entity as ordi- 
narily known to sense, are liable to confuse the in- 
attentive reader, and were it not for the extreme elo- 
quence of the poem — the persistent beauty of line and 
phrase — so much subtlety and metaphysics would keep 
the piece from being what it is — a delight to read, a 
genuine and unquestioned work of art. With the boy's 
first sense of the eternal element in him comes, if he 
be that way gifted, the creative instinct: 

Then as from shadowy pines, before light comes, 

A solitary wood-note bursts too soon — 

Some bird hath waked, and feels his darkened wings — 1 

Low in the hollow of the sea-blown wood 

[46] 



GEORGE EDWARD W O O D B E R R Y 

/ set my fingers to the unknown stops, 

And blew; and fresh as over quiet fields 

Rises the burden of the bough and briar, 

New music, wild and sweet, blown through the world, 

So rose my idyl; all the valley -side 

Was hushed, and clinging to my lips the reed 

Felt the first tremor of immortal breath; 

And like an angel singing in his birth, 

Aloft the lone and mounting melody 

Moved, darkling, to the bosom of the dawn. 

But the ideal self — "All I could never be," to use 
Browning's phrase — comes to be imaged as a fair 
youth thinking noble thoughts, a visible form that can- 
not be approached, but summing in himself all aspira- 
tion, must remain perpetually an object of desire: 

Awe came upon me seeing in his face 

The lineaments of my own all sweetly changed 

To that ideal I hope to wear in heaven. 

So with his passion blending more and more, 

As the dark earth when sinks the starry west, 

Mortal I moved to meet eternal light; 

And, moving, dreamed how that young soul should be 

The flaming of a torch across the years, 

And through the world the rising of a star. 

Ay me! but what avails to nurse the soul, 
And zvill the better world, that heaven delays? 
When hath it come? Soon gathered round his heart — 
O, too familiar to this clouded breast — 
Immortal dread, awe of the alien powers 
In this dark sphere, — these vague infinities 
Of matter round the solitude of mind 
With menace, this dull crush of monstrous force 
Crumbling the dense compact, this far-strown world, 

[47] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

Abysmal being without mete or bound, 

With endless shadows roved; whence thought, alarmed, 

Strains in its orbit and its casing frame, 

Ranges the vast, and calls from star to star, 

With question of this cold eternity. 

O striving Stress, O everlasting Might, 

In every atom spawning energy 

And cradling life in every blowing germ, 

Storm of the world, swift drift and surge of time 

That lifts the swimmer to the rushing flood 

One moment's space, and thrusts him down to hell, 

And rolls the next aloft, zvhile, age on age, 

Millions of men innumerably spread, 

Faces along the illimitable wave, 

Float up, and look, and sink, — O star-cold Space, 

When hast thou answered, unto whom, or where! 

Soon youth gains an equally clear perception of the 
evils that are in life, and when this comes, the reality 
and immanence of the ideal seem lost — 

Too mortal is he born whom God doth choose! 

This part of the poem is carried forward through a 
superb succession of wild landscape pictures, until 
finally when the shock of surprise has worn away, 
good and evil, beauty and deformity, are seen together, 
forces eternally in conflict; and youth consecrates it- 
self to the quest of the ideal, knowing well that the 
pathway will be hard but not yet quite realizing what 
terrors — material and immaterial — infest it. 

There, by the slope, and worming o'er the edge, 
The narrow track of noble peril ran; 
And, thinly springing, many a lonely sheaf 
Of beamy blades and starry-dipping points 

[48] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

Flashed back the battle of the dying world. 
He saw — he sprang — he heard the challenge peal, 
Caught like the mighty blast of Roland dead 
Far-blown from standards of the fallen Christ; 
And light overflowed within him, light long sought, 
From the old sources gushing, light divine, 
Whose piercing revelation nought obstructs, 
Created or imagined or devised, 
The masks of mimicry or vestures true, 
Earth's massy mould or the dark breast of man. 

Except for the exquisite lyrical interludes which have 
the reflective function of the Greek chorus and com- 
ment on the action, the remainder of the book is taken 
up with the description of successive phases of evil that 
become apparent to the young soul, sometimes wound- 
ing it and sometimes causing it to waver in the bitter- 
ness of growing despair; for ever as it follows on, 
mounting higher and higher on its lonely way, it sees 
more of the evil that is in the life of the present and 
grows able, with accumulated knowledge, to vision 
more clearly universal decay, the transitoriness of all 
things, the worm eternally feeding on the heart of 
beauty. 

And ever where the far horizons flung 
Round him with mightier folds the starry robe, 
He read the man-myth on the shining hem, — 
Iran, Chaldea, Egypt, — and more late, 
Divinely springing from the Olympian mount, 
The torch-race of the ever-dying gods, 
Orb after orb of throneless deity; 
And spectral o'er him broke in that frore air 
The burnt-out hopes, and ghosts of prophecy, 
That once from holy hearts rose charioted, 

[49] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

And in the zenith hung their mighty faiths, — 

Visions of old, by every mastering race 

Set in the blazing zodiac of time; 

The fiery pillar that brought Israel forth 

Rose like an exhalation; flaming stood 

The Cross that went before imperial Rome; 

Pale swam the moon of Islam dropping blood; 

And out they flickered, brief as shooting stars; 

Then dark the slow recovery of his sight, 

Weary of all that never ceasing death, 

Saw Lethe roll against a purple dawn, . . . 

The close of the book leaves the Roamer apparently 
overcome by the forces of evil and, like Roland at 
Roncesvalles, consoled only by the sense of his own 
loyalty : 

And in his ears faint rang the dying blast 
Of Roland dead with all his chivalry. 

The Roamer is a very noble poem, and its connection 
with the rest of Mr. Woodberry's work is obvious. 



[50] 



CHAPTER V. 

Intense spirituality ; a passionate loyalty to the ideal 
with an almost equal devotion to the world of sense, 
the two being seen oftenest as forces in conflict, or 
the one as a lure winning the spirit from its consecra- 
tion to the other; a growing breadth of interest and 
sympathy issuing in an increased externality and lack 
of self-centredness ; the love of children ; an unusually 
keen appreciation of color and light; a growing per- 
ception of the complete inter-relation of all manifesta- 
tions of the life-spirit; these are the leading charac- 
teristics of Mr. Woodberry as a poet. He is of the 
great Platonic tradition which has been handed down 
in English poetry by Shelley and Wordsworth, and 
Shelleyean is his insistence upon love as the means 
of race-salvation, and upon the complete realization of 
democracy as the essential step in social progress. His 
New Englandism, from certain traditional phases of 
which he subsequently revolted, has been sufficiently 
pointed out, and there is no need of dwelling further 
upon that glow of color which came to his poetry 
from the Mediterranean years; but the thought has 
not been more than suggested that the poet's develop- 
ment from the subjectivity and localization of interest 
shown in his early work to that all-embracing sym- 
pathy and sense of kinship which make his later poems 
what they are, may also have been a gift of that older 
world, where the individual is seen against a back- 
ground of the ages, and the continuity of life, through 
perpetual recurrence of bloom and decay, leaves its 
impress upon the least sensitive mind. Greece is not 
dead — nor Italy — and bountiful Demeter still pours 

[51] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

upon her Mediterranean lands an inexhaustible gift 
to mortals. Had it not been for Greece, for the affinity 
between the author's mind and the great traditions of 
European culture, his poetry would have been a dif- 
ferent, a less intensely living thing than it is. 

One as familiar as Mr. Woodberry must be with 
the imaginative literature of the world — one with the 
scholar's perspective — can only create genuine poetry 
of his own if he is of the few who being driven on- 
ward by a sort of inner necessity, are actually called 
to do so. A poet, for example, who had never heard 
of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, the ingenious Mrs. Behn, 
"Paul and Virginia," or "Daphnis and Chloe," might 
invent for himself the theory of the return to nature 
and express it with passionate sincerity; but one to 
whom the idea was familiar as an element in the cul- 
ture of the race would have to bring to his annuncia- 
tion of it something new and peculiarly his own to 
make his message seem of importance either to him- 
self or to a reader similarly endowed. It is the pas- 
sion in Mr. Woodberry, the intensity of his spirit- 
uality, the persistence and conviction with which he 
clings to the ideal that, with the peculiar iridescence 
of his style, give to his poetry its distinctive value. 

In the work of poets of Mr. Woodberry's type there 
are over- tones, the glow of reflected lights which bring 
to their creations an added wealth of beauty. The 
reader whose mind is sufficiently stocked, who is sensi- 
tively receptive of these impressions, in reading such 
poems reads also Sophocles and Virgil, Dante and 
Petrarch; he whose ear is attuned to catch the over- 
tones perceives — subconsciously it may be — that each 
poem has a beauty added to its own beauty, a duality 
of existence, like that which has been referred to in 
another connection, each being seen as a thing having 

[52] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

life and beauty of its own and seen at the same time 
as a new manifestation of the race-mind, a new blos- 
soming of the human spirit. The glamor brought to 
a poem by its overtones, by the perception of its flow- 
ering from a stalk which is rooted deep in race-con- 
sciousness and brings forth blooms of beauty in per- 
petual succession, gives it a double power of appeal, 
an effectiveness that depends on what the reader is 
able to read into it — to the prepared ground on which 
it falls. This theory, like some others that have been 
referred to in the more general considerations of the 
present volume, has been developed by Mr. Woodberry 
himself in his prose works and only a very minor 
aspect of it can be illustrated here. Thomas Hardy 
has a poem which commences, 

"When I set out for Lyonesse'' ; 

and the phrase has all the romance of the Arthurian 
stories back of it ; if the author's destination had been 
C abridge the line would produce in a reader fa- 
mi . with Mr. Hardy's novels an entirely different 
set of reactions, it would call to his mind new and 
equally distinct images; but if the word Liverpool 
should be substituted for the word Lyonesse, the line 
would have no overtones at all, no meaning other than 
geographical except to the few who happen to have 
intimate associations with that place. Either substitu- 
tion would alter and limit the appeal. A word like 
Lyonesse has its overtones, but ideas and ideals which 
have lived on from generation to generation, in gather- 
ing to themselves an accretion of spiritual significance, 
have gained an existence more real than that of any 
transient reality. The perception of these things 
counts in art — and in life ; and one cannot justly ap- 
preciate a poem unless he knows whereof the author 

[53] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

speaks. Mr. Woodberry's poetry presupposes the ex- 
istence of things of the spirit and some of it demands 
from the reader an openness to spiritual contacts. The 
poet's practical idealism is his own by right of personal 
possession ; it is also a part of the inherited traditions 
of European culture with which he is familiar, and 
the reader who is able to see in it the glamor of famil- 
iar things, old aspirations, old strivings of the spirit, 
will not only get more out of it than one who is not, 
but will also be able to appreciate more justly and 
more keenly those elements of beauty in the author's 
work which are peculiarly his own. 

Superficially, Mr. Woodberry with his idealism, is 
somewhat of a poet's poet, his appeal coming most 
strongly to those who find the air he breathes native, 
or at least, not wholly unfamiliar. Looking more 
deeply than this, he is the poet of youth, giving, as he 
does, voice to those usually evanescent ideals and as- 
pirations whose flowering is of the springtime; but 
pursuing the inquiry still further, we find that mood of 
longing which he has made distinctively his own, that 
passionate craving for permanence, the ideal, in a 
world of impermanence, which is the spiritual burden 
of his message, to be one that lies deep in the general 
heart of man and is a universal phase of human ex- 
perience. Youth can follow most easily — at least in 
imagination — Mr. Woodberry's starry flight ; but there 
is hardly anyone who does not find at one time or an- 
other welling up through buried strata of consciousness 
that mood of aspiration which the poet has given his 
years to express; and a writer of verse whose char- 
acteristic view of life, whose message, is of general 
human significance has in his subject matter the sub- 
stance of poetry whose value is enduring, and has 
at least one characteristic of a major rather than of 

[54] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

a minor poet. 

No attempt to estimate Mr. Woodberry's position 
as a vital force in American life and letters — and this 
is an attempt which the present writer does not feel 
called upon to make — can afford to forget for a mo- 
ment that while his poetry may be the final distillation 
of what he has in him, the writing of verse is only 
one of the ways in which he has found means of self- 
expression. He is best known to the world at large 
as a writer of prose, a constructive thinker whose 
sympathetic, interpretative criticisms of art and of life 
have won him a place of distinction among his con- 
temporaries; but beside this, there is that peculiar 
power of his personality which has affected strongly 
the young men who have come into contact with him 
in his classrooms or elsewhere, and is a fact recognized 
even by those who are entirely out of sympathy with 
the man and with his work. He has a strange ability 
to evoke loyalty in the most curiously diverse kinds of 
people — poets and business men, leaders of fashion 
and outcasts, intellectuals and Calabrian peasants — and 
the fact of his having this power even over some who 
probably never have read anything he has written, or 
who read it only because it is his, is a sufficient 
comment upon the genuineness of that sympathetic 
understanding and idealism which are traits of his 
work. Poetry is an expression of personality and it 
may well be that that passionate sincerity, that un- 
worldly and unwavering insistence upon spiritual 
values which we have noted in the one may be in 
the other what has drawn men to him. Whether or 
not that ideal world of which most catch fleeting 
glimpses and which to some seems home, be only an- 
other illusion of the senses, the enduring perception of 
it made Wordsworth what he was, and in Mr. Wood- 

[55] 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 

berry's case has drawn to him, through his life as 
through his art, the heart of youth. 

Poetry is a shadow, the imperfect representation of 
something else; it is also the opening of a door, and 
the function of criticism is to show what door has been 
opened and to help eyes that are unaccustomed to all 
but objects of common familiarity see the beauty that 
is beyond. If a poet lifts only a corner of the painted 
veil, if he brings to us even a little of the white radi- 
ance, his mission is accomplished ; and the peculiarity 
of Mr. Woodberry's poetry is that what it preserves 
of the light beyond is comparatively unstained by 
transmission. 

Since the publication of the 1914 volume, the occa- 
sional appearance in the magazines of poems by Mr. 
Woodberry has given evidence of his continued cre- 
ative activity, and at the close of such a study as this 
it is pleasant to look forward. The war must have 
stirred him deeply, and whether his next publication 
be the completed Roamer or a collection of new and 
shorter pieces it will be interesting to see how his 
belief in the coming of a new age, his faith in the 
realization of brotherhood may have changed or de- 
veloped. Mr. Woodberry is a profound thinker as 
well as a poet; and his message of idealism, of 
spirituality and brotherhood is one that America 
should ponder.* 



♦Since these lines were sent to the printer the Woodberry 
Society has announced the immediate publication of a volume 
of sonnets written by Mr. Woodberry and entitled Ideal 
Passion. 



[56] 



BIB LI OGR AP H Y 

I. 
1871-72. 

♦Contributions to The Voice, written at Exeter. 

The Voice was a country weekly newspaper, published (an 
Exeter classmate says) in New Hampshire. The editor of- 
fered two columns to the Exeter school boys, in connection 
with his contribution to the new Academy building. Mr. 
Woodberry was one of the six school editors. In this paper 
appeared his first printed poem — The Greek Beggar (?) — and 
other things. No copy known. 

II. 
1873. 

The Magenta, Harvard, Vol. I, No. 9, p. 101. Sonnet, "O 
Love, whom I in early dreams have seen." 

III. 
1873-76. 

Contributions (verse and prose) to the Harvard Advocate. 

Vol. XV., No. 1— March 11, 1873— Forebodings. 

Vol. XV., No. 3— April 1, 1873— Horace. 

Vol. XV., No. 6— May 2, 1873— Blushes. 

Vol. XV, No. 7— May 14, 1873— Three Songs: Flowers, 
Fruits, Twilight. 

Vol. XVI, No. 4— Oct. 31, 1873— Sea Mists. 

Vol. XVI, No. 6— Nov. 28, 1873— To a Star. 

Vol. XVI., No. 9— Jan. 23, 1874— Semper Resurgens. 

Vol. XVIL, No. 1— Feb. 20, 1874— An Elective in Art 
(Prose). Signed "H. N. D.," which was his pseudonym. 

Vol. XVIL, No. 1— Feb. 20, 1874— Sonnet. Shelley. 

Vol. XVIL, No. 6— May 1, 1874— Desecration. 

Mr. Woodberry was one of the editors of Vol. XVIL 

Vol. XVIIL, Supplement Oct. 3, 1874— Sonnet on Reading 
Spenser. 

Vol. XVIIL, Supplement Oct. 3, 1874— Cigarette Ash. 

Vol. XVIIL, No. 2— Oct. 6, 1874— The Violet Crown. (See 
Lowell's comment on this poem quoted Nebraska Literary 
Magazine, Vol. I., No. 1.) 

Vol. XVIIL, No. 5— Nov. 27, 1874-Sonnet. By the Night 

Vol. XVIIL, No. 6— Dec. 11, 1874— Paul at Athens. A 
Cynic Philosopher and his Scholar Lycius. 

Mr. Woodberry was not an editor of Vol. XVIIL, being 
absent from college. 



*The compiler regrets that he has been obliged to leave to the 
industry or good fortune of some future bibliographer the details 
which should have been given under numbers I, VI, VIII and XVIII. 

[57] 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Vol. XIX., No. 2— March 5, 1875— Lydian Airs (Three 
poems). 

Vol. XIX., No. 2— March 5, 1875— The Life and Death of 
Pietro, A. D. 1348. 

Vol. XIX., No. 3— March 19, 1875— Lydian Airs (Two 
poems). 

Vol. XIX., No. 4— April 2, 1875— The Philosophical De- 
partment (Prose). 

Vol. XIX., No. 5— April 16, 1875— The Wanderer's Refrain. 

Vol. XIX., No. 5— April 16, 1875— Sonnet on an Easter 
Sunrise. 

Vol. XIX., No. 5— April 16, 1875— Sonnet. Unnoticed Love. 

Vol. XIX., No. 9— June 16, 1875— The Study of Ideas 
(Prose). 

Mr. Woodberry was one of the editors of Vol. XIX. 

Vol. XX., No. 1— Oct. 1, 1875— Aristophanes Apology (Re- 
view). 

Vol. XX, No. 2— Oct. 8, 1875— In May Days. 

Vol. XX., No. 4— Nov. 5, 1875— The Antigone at Harvard 
(Prose). 

Vol. XX, No. 5— Nov. 19, 1875— An Evolutionist's Idea of 
Harvard (Prose). 

Vol. XX, No. 6— Dec. 3, 1875— The Culture of our Stu- 
dents (Prose). 

Vol. XX, No. 8— Jan. 10, 1876— Victorian Poets (Review). 

Vol. XX, No. 10— Feb. 4, 1876— Song. 

Vol. XX, No. 10— Feb. 4, 1876— Ode to a Forest Rose. 

Vol. XX, No. 10— Feb. 4, 1876— Dansville Hills. 

Mr. Woodberry was one of the editors of Volume XX. 

Vol. XXI, No. 1— Feb. 18, 1876— After Sunset. 

Vol. XXI, No. 1— Feb. 18, 1876— Serenade. 

Vol. XXI, No. 3— March 17, 1876— Parting Song. 

Vol. XXI, No. 6— April 28, 1876— The Phi Beta Kappa Sup- 
per (?) (Prose). 

Vol. XXI, No. 10— June 23 t 1876— The Harvard Decalogue. 

Mr. Woodberry was one of the editors of Volume XXI. 

IV. 

1876. 

Verses from the Harvard Advocate. Hurd & Houghton. 
New York. 1876. 

This volume contains fourteen poems by G. E. W, re- 
printed from the Advocate. 

V. 
October, 1876- June, 1878. 

Contributions (verse and prose) to the Harvard Advocate. 
Among Mr. Woodberry's contributions, many were unsigned 

[58] 



B IB LI OGRAP H Y 

editorials, etc. Those known to be by him are : 

Vol. XXII, No. 9— Jan. 26, 1877— Arachne's Spinning. 

Vol. XXII., No. 10— Feb. 2, 1877— Prosit Neujahr. 

Mr. Woodberry was an editor of Vol. XXII. 

Vol. XXIII., No. 3— March 16, 1877— Lines Upon Hearing 
Some Music. 

Vol. XXIIL, No. 5— April 10, 1877— Sonnet. After read- 
ing Keats' letters. (The reference is to Lord Houghton's 
Life.) 

Vol. XXIIL, No. 8— The Senior Petitions. 

Vol. XXIV., No. 5— Nov. 16, 1877— Lines in Autumn. 

VI. 

1876-1891. 

Reviews in Atlantic. Boston. The great bulk of these were 
1880-1891. The Atlantic index, 1889, lists seventy-three titles. 

VII. 
1877. 

The Relation of Pallas Athene to Athens. Oratio a Georgio 
Edvardo Woodberry. Written for the Harvard Commence- 
ment, 1877. Privately printed for the Signet Society of Har- 
vard University, 1877. Paper. Eleven pages. Thirty copies 
printed. 

VIII. 
1878-1903. 

Reviews in The Nation. New York. 

The great bulk of these were 1878-79 and 1884-91. They 
are unsigned, but there is said to be an index giving the au- 
thors of all unsigned articles in the vaults at the office of 
The Nation. 

IX. 
1879. 

History of Wood-Engraving (two articles), in Harper's 
Magazine. 

X. 

1881. 

The Fortunes of Literature under the American Republic. 
Fortnightly Review. May. Reprinted in Eclectic Magazine. 

XI. 
1882. 

The Real Issues in the University. A public letter by Pro- 
fessors Church, Emerson, and Woodberry. Written by G. E. 

[59] 



B IBLIOGRAP H Y 

W. Issued February, 1882. Appeared also translated into 
German in the Nebraska Staats-Anzeiger. 

XII. 
1883 

Trial printing of The North Shore Watch. July 22. One 
proof. Lincoln, Nebraska. 

XIII. 
1883. 

The North Shore Watch. 

Boards, vel. back, 200 copies, Privately Printed (by sub- 
scription). With engraved frontispiece. 

XIV. 
1883. 
A History of Wood Engraving. Illustrated. 
Harper & Brothers, New York. 

XV. 
1885. 
Edgar Allan Poe. 

Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston. With portrait. 
In American Men of Letters Series. 

XVI. 
1886. 

Second Series. New verses from the Harvard Advocate, 
1876-1886. Privately printed by Kilbourne Tompkins, No. 79 
Cedar Street, New York. Contains four poems by G. E. W. 
that appeared in the Advocate between October, 1876, and 
June, 1878. 

XVII. 
1887. 

My Country: An Ode. 

Privately printed, 50 copies. Blue paper covers. Published 
in Atlantic Monthly, July, 1887. 

XVIII. 
1888. The Boston Post. 

G. E. W. was Literary Editor for a year and wrote a great 
deal for it. 

XIX. 
1888. 

Song of Promise. Words by George Edward Woodberry. 
Composed by John Knowles Paine, Op. 43, for the Cincinnati 

[60] 



B IB LI OGRAP H Y 

Musical Festival of May, 1888. Published by the John Church 
Co. of Cincinnati. Paper covers. (Words from "My Country.") 

XX. 

1889. 

Authors at Home. Edited by J. L. and J. B. Gilder. Cas- 
sell Publishing Co. New York. 

Article, James Russell Lowell (republished from the Critic). 

XXI. 
1889. 

Notes on the MS. Volume of Shelley's Poems in the Library 
of Harvard College. Bibliographical Contributions No. 35. 
Cambridge, Mass. Issued by the Library of Harvard Uni- 
versity. 

XXII. 
1889. 
Agathon. 
Trial printing. Two or three copies printed. Unbound. 

XXIII. 
1890. 
The North Shore Watch and Other Poems. 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston. 

XXIV. 
1890. 

Studies in Letters and Life. 

Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston. 

Reprints, with revision, from the Atlantic and The Nation. 
Red cloth. 

Same in blue cloth. 

XXV. 

1891. 
Literature in the Market-place. The Forum. August. 

XXVI. 
1892. 

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley; 
The Text newly Collated and Revised and Edited, with a 
Memoir and Notes by George Edward Woodberry. Centen- 
ary edition in four volumes. 

Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston. With portrait. 

Same. Large paper. In eight parts. 250 sets printed. 

[61] 



B IB LI OGRAP H Y 

XXVII. 
1892. 
The Essays of Elia, with an introduction by G. E. W. 
Published by Little, Brown & Co. Boston. 2 Vols. 

XXVIII. 
1893. 

Memorial Celebration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the 
Birth of Edwin Booth. Held in the Madison Square Garden 
Concert Hall, November 13, 1893, by The Players. Contains 
Elegy by G. E. W., pp. 44-52. 

The Players' Elegy on the Death of Edwin Booth : Read at 
the Memorial Service, held under the direction of The Play- 
ers, in the Madison Square Garden Concert Hall, November 
13, 1893. Privately printed, New York, 1893. Thirty-five copies 
numbered and signed. The De Vinne Press. Blue paper 
covers. The poem was first published in The Evening Post 
(New York), November 13, 1893. 

XXIX. 

1893. 

The English Drama: Its Rise and Development to 1640. 
By Thomas R. Price, G. E. Woodberry and A. V. W. Jackson. 
Syllabus (20). Albany. Regents University Extension De- 
partment. 

XXX. 

1894. 

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Newly Collected and 
Edited, with a Memoir, Critical Introductions, and Notes, by 
E. C. Stedman and George E. Woodberry. 10 Vols. Illus- 
trated. Stone & Kimball. Chicago. 

(1) Ordinary edition. (2) Large paper. (3) In vellum 
with drawings by Beardsley. 

The Same. Special issue. The Colonial Company, Pitts- 
burgh, 1903. (1) Ordinary edition. (2) Autograph edition. 
(3) Bibliophile edition. 

The Same. Duffield and Company, New York, 1907. Single 
volume, The Poems, etc., 1907. 

The Same. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York. 1914. 
Pocket edition, in cloth and flexible leather. 

The Same. 1914. From new plates in large and handsome 
type. 

XXXI. 

1894. 

Selections from the Poems of Aubrey de Vere, edited, with 
a Preface, by G. E. W. 

[62] 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The Macmillan Co. New York. With a portrait. 
G. E. W. also wrote a brief introductory note to Aubrey 
de Vere's Recollections in the Century. 

XXXII. 
1895. 

Memories. Nebraska Literary Magazine, Vol. L, No. 1. 
May. 

XXXIII. 
1895. 

To A. V. W. J . 

Twenty copies printed without title-page. De Vinne Press. 
Blue paper covers. 

XXXIV. 
1895. 

Household Waifs from many Years, by Known and Un- 
known Poets. Arranged by G. E. W. (with introductory 
quatrain by G. E. W.). Privately printed, New York, Christ- 
mas, 1895. De Vinne Press. 20 Copies. Blue paper covers. 

XXXV. 

189- ? 

The Roamer, Book I. 6 copies. Privately printed. De 
Vinne Press. Blue paper covers. 

XXXVI. 
1896-98. 

Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Mod- 
ern. Edited by Charles Dudley Warner. R. S. Peale & Co. 
New York. 

Articles, Arnold, Coleridge, Shelley. 

XXXVII. 
1896-99. 

Columbia College. 

English XIII. Parts i., ii. Notes for students, on English 
Poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a brief 
bibliography for dramatic reading. Two pamphlets. 
1899. 

English II. Book of the Course, Sect. 1. Red paper. 42 
pages. A re-print of Rough Notes, 1896-97, and Guide Notes, 
1898-99, a pamphlet and five leaflets for student use, together 
with bibliographical lists. 

XXXVIII. 
1897. 
A School Hymn. Harper's Round Table. June 29. 

[63]^ 



B I B LI OGRAP H Y 

XXXIX. 

1898. 
The Islands of the Sea. 
Privately printed. One sheet. July 4, 1898. 

XL. 

1898. 
Essex Regiment March. 
Privately printed. One sheet. 

XLI. 
1899. 

Rhymes, The Momingside, Columbia University, January 1, 
1899. 

XLII. 
1899. 

A Christmas Greeting, Columbia Spectator, December 21, 
1899. 

XLIII. 
1899. 
Wild Eden. 
The Macmillan Co. New York. 

XLIV. 
1899. 

Warner Classics. (Matthew Arnold, pp. 97-125.) R. S. 
Peale & Co. New York. 

XLV. 
1899. 
Heart of Man. (With dedicatory quatrain.) 
The Macmillan Co. New York. 

XLVI. 
1899. 
Mrs. Ward and the Brontes. Harper's Bazar, 

XLVII. 
1900. 

The Roamer. Book I. 

In East and West, Vol. I., No. 12. New York. 

This "Monthly Magazine of Letters," which was discon- 
tinued with No. 12, was "edited and published by William 
Aspenwall Bradley and George Sidney Hellman," both mem- 
bers of Columbia '99. 

[641 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 
XLVIII. 

1900. 

Essays of Bacon. With an Introduction by G. E. W. (The 
Century Classics.) 

The Century Co. New York. With portrait. 

XLIX. 
1900. 

The Century of Achievement in Literature. Harper's 
Weekly. 

L. 
1900. 

Makers of Literature. 

The Macmillan Co. New York. 

A reprint of "Studies in Letters and Life," together with 
later prefaces, articles, etc. The essay on The Promise of 
Keats was accidentally omitted. The essay on Whittier was 
reprinted, Boston Evening Transcript, Dec. 14, 1907. (Essays 
on Shelley, Landor, Browning, Byron, Arnold, Coleridge, 
Lowell, Whittier, and others.) 

LI. 
1901. 

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 
Cambridge edition. (One Vol.) Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
Boston. Newly and completely annotated. With a portrait. 

LII. 
1902. 

One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature, with 
Facsimiles of the Title Pages, and an introduction by George 
Edward Woodberry. The Grolier Club of the City of New 
York. 305 copies printed. 

LIII. 
1902. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

American Men of Letters Series. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
Boston. Dark red cloth. With portrait. 

Same. Light red cloth. Uncut. Paper label. 

Same. Large paper. 600 copies printed. 

LIV. 
1903. 

Journal of Comparative Literature. Quarterly. 

New York, McClure, Phillips & Co. Edited by G. E. W. 
Four numbers issued. No. 1 has editorial by G. E. W., also 
separately issued as a leaflet. This is all he wrote for the 
Journal. 

[65] 



B IBLI OGRAP H Y 
LV. 

1903. 

Ode read at the Emerson Centenary Services, Boston, May 
24, 1903. Privately printed leaflet, 12 pages. Published At- 
lantic Monthly, June, 1903. 

LVI. 
1903. 

To Nineteen Three, Columbia. The Nineteen Hundred and 
Three Class Book. Published by the Class in June, 1903. Also 
privately printed as a leaflet. Four pages. 

LVII. 
1903. 

Representative English comedies, with introductory essays, 
etc., by various writers, under the general editorship of 
Charles Mills Gayley. The Macmillan Co. New York 
(Robert Green: his place in comedy, pp. 385-394.) 



LVIII. 
1903. 

Exeter Ode. Read at the dedication of Alumni Hall, Phil- 
lips Exeter Academy, June 17, 1903. Privately printed leaflet 
— eight pages. 

Published in Exercises incident to the General Reunion of 
the Alumni of Phillips Exeter Academy on the occasion of 
the opening of the new Alumni Hall, 1903. pp. 31-35. 1904. 

LIX. 
1903. 
Requiem. Thomas Randolph Price. 
Privately printed — one sheet. 

LX. 
Privately printed. De Vinne Press. New York. Blue 
paper covers. Six copies printed. 
The First Two Books of The Roamer. 



LXI. 
1903. 

Poems of the House and Other Poems, by Elizabeth M. 
Olmsted. Privately printed. De Vinne Press. 200 numbered 
copies. Contains editorial note and Sonnet: To the Author 
on her Golden Wedding, by G. E. W. ; and Sonnet to G. E. W., 
on his Twentieth Birthday. With portrait. 



[66] 



B IB LI OGR AP H Y 

LXII. 
1903. 

Poems : My Country, Wild Eden, The Players' Elegy, The 
North Shore Watch, Odes and Sonnets. 

The Macmillan Co. New York. 

This is a nearly complete collection of previous poems, with 
new poems (except The Roamer). 

LXIII. 
1903. 
America in Literature. 
Harper & Brothers. New York. 
Collected from Harper's Magazine. 

LXIV. 
1904. 
New International Encyclopaedia. Article, Shelley. 

LXV. 
1904. 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. By Samuel Taylor Cole- 
ridge. Edited with Introduction. 
American Book Co. New York. The Gateway Series. 

LXVI. 
1904. 
Chamber's Cyclopaedia of English Literature. 3 Vols. 

The general article on American Colonial Literature and a 
few notes on its authors are by G. E. W. 

LXVII. 
1905. 

The Torch. Eight lectures on Race Power in Literature, 
delivered before the Lowell Institute of Boston, 1903. 

(Man and the Race, The Language of all the World, The 
Titan Myth, I. and II., Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley.) 
McClure, Phillips & Co. New York. 

Reissued. The Macmillan Co. New York. 1912. 

LXVIII. 
1905. 
Swinburne. 

McClure, Phillips & Co. New York. 
Contemporary Men of Letters Series. 
Reissued. The Macmillan Co. New York. 1912. 
English edition by Heinemann. 

LXIX. 
1907. 

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited, etc., 
by Sidney Lee. Vol. VI. A Midsummer Night's Dream, with 
a Special Introduction by G. E. W. George D. Sproul, New 

[67] 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

York. Illustrated. 
The same. Vol. III. The Harper Edition. New York 

LXX. 

1907. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
English Men of Letters Series. 
The Macmillan Co. New York. 

LXXI. 

1907. 
The Appreciation of Literature. 
The Baker & Taylor Co. New York. 
Reissued by Doubleday, Page and Co. 

LXXII. 

1907. 

Great Writers. (Cervantes, Scott, Milton, Virgil, Mon- 
taigne, Shakespere.) • „ 

The McClure Co. New York. 

Shortened forms of some of these essays had appeared 
in McC lure's Magazine. 

Reissued, The Macmillan Co. 1912. New York. 

LXXIII. 
1907. 

Salem Atheneum. Address of G. E. W., Litt.D., LL.D., at 
the formal opening of Plummer Hall, Oct. 2, 1907. Salem, 
Mass., Salem Atheneum, 1907. Green paper covers. 

LXXIV. 
1908. 

Select Poems of Shelley. Edited with Introduction and 
Notes. (The essay on Shelley's Poetry is new.) 

D. C. Heath & Co., Boston. Belles-Lettres Series. 

LXXV. 

1908. 

The Defence of Poesie, etc., by Sir Philip Sidney, edited 
with Introduction by G. E. W. 

The Merrymount Press, Boston. The Humanists' Library. 
303 copies. 

LXXVI. 
1909. 

The Old Farmer's Almanac by Robert B. Thomas. Boston, 
William Ware & Co., No. 117. Paper covers. Contains Son- 
net: Etna. 

[68] 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 
LXXVII. 

1909. 

Tennyson's The Princess. Edited with Notes and an In- 
troduction by G. E. W. 

Longmans, Green & Co. New York. 

LXXVIII. 
1909. 

L'Amerique Litteraire et ses Ecrivains. 

Ouvrage adapte de l'Anglais par Achille Laurent. J. Du- 
moulin. Paris. Blue paper covers. A translation of America 
in Literature, with simple biographical and bibliographical 
notes by G. E. W. not in the American edition. 

LXXIX. 
1909. 

Life of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 Vols. (A new work — not a 
reprint). 

Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston. Illustrated. 

Same. Large paper. Paper label. 150 copies printed. 

LXXX. 

1909. 

The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by G. E. W. 
(with introduction, notes, appendix, and bibliographies). 

Belles Lettres Series. D. C. Heath & Co. Boston. 

LXXXI. 

1910. 

The Inspiration of Poetry. Eight lectures on Poetic Energy 
delivered before the Lowell Institute of Boston, 1906. 

The Macmillan Co. New York. 

(Poetic Madness, Marlowe, Camoens, Byron, Gray, Tasso, 
Lucretius, Inspiration.) 

LXXXII. 

1910. 

Transactions of the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences. 
Vol. I., Part II. Poe Cententary Exercises, Jan. 19, 1909. 
New York. Published for the Society, May, 1910. Contains 
brief address by G. E. W., who presided. 

LXXXIII. 
1911. ) 

Encyclopedia Britannica. Article, American Literature. 

[69] 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

LXXXIV. 
1911. 
European Years. 

Edited with Introduction by G. E. W. 
Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston. 

LXXXV. 
1912. 

♦Wendell Phillips. The Faith of an American. 300 copies, 
100 numbered and signed. 

The Woodberry Society. New York. 

LXXXVI. 
1912. 

*A Day at Castrogiovanni. 300 copies, 75 numbered and 
signed. 

The Woodberry Society. New York. 

LXXXVII. 
1912. 

♦The Kingdom of All-Souls and Two Other Poems for 
Christmas. 300 copies, 100 numbered and signed. 

The Woodberry Society. New York. 

LXXXVIII. 
1913. 

New Letters of an Idle Man, by Hermann Jackson Warner, 
author of European Years. Edited by G. E. W. London. 
Constable & Co. This contains a brief note by the editor. 

LXXXIX. 
1913. 

Proceedings at the opening of the new Library Building, 
June 20, 1913, Beverly, Mass. Printed for the Trustees, 1913. 
Pamphlet, pp. 18. Blue covers. The principal address was 
made by G. E. W. 

XC. 
1913. 

The Phi Beta Kappa Poem. In Memoriam Charles Eliot 
Norton. Boston Evening Transcript, June 21, 1913. 

Issued also as a leaflet. 

XCI. 
1914. 

The Flight and Other Poems. 

The Macmillan Co. New York. 

One hundred copies signed by the author, numbered and 
specially bound, were issued for members of the Woodberry 
Society. 

# The Publications of the Woodberry Society can be obtained through 
the book stores by application to William B. Symmes, Jr., Secretary, 
55 Liberty Street, New York City. 

[70] 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

XCII. 
1914. 
North Africa and the Desert. 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 

XCIII. 
1914. 

♦Two Phases of Criticism: Historical and Aesthetic. 

Lectures delivered on The Larwill Foundation of Kenyon 
College, May Seventh and Eighth, 1913. 400 copies, 100 num- 
bered and signed. 

The Woodberry Society. New York. 

XCIV. 

1915. 

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. 

With an introduction by George Edward Woodberry and a 
biographical note by Margaret Lavington. With portrait. 

John Lane Company. New York. 

One hundred copies of the first edition were specially 
bound for the Woodberry Society, and contained a supple- 
mentary note, an extra portrait, and facsimile. 



xcv. 

1915. 

Peace. Words by George Edward Woodberry. Music by 
Louis Adolphe Coern. Op. 81. (Copyright, 1915.) 

Clayton F. Summy Co., Chicago. 



XCVI. 
1916. 

♦Shakespeare: An Address. (Brown University, April 26.) 
300 copies, 75 numbered and signed. 

The Woodberry Society. New York. 

XCVII. 
1917. 

*Ideal Passion : Sonnets. (Announced for publication in 
March.) 400 copies, 100 numbered and signed. 

The Woodberry Society. New York. 

* The Publications of the Woodberry Society can be obtained through 
the book stores, or by application to William H. Symmes, Jr., Secretary, 
55 Liberty Street, New York City. 



[71] 



ADDENDA. 
A. 

General Editor National Studies in American Letters. The 
Macmillan Co., New York. Four Vols. No writing by 
G. E. W. The titles in the series are: 

Old Cambridge. By Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1899. 

Brook Farm. By Lindsay Swift, 1900. 

The Clergy in American Life and Letters. By Daniel Du- 
lany Addison, 1900. 

The Hoosiers. By Meredith Nicholson, 1900. 

B. 

General Editor Columbia Studies in Comparative Literature. 
The Macmillan Co. New York. Eight Vols. No writing 
by G. E. W. The titles in the series are: 

Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. By Joel Elias Spin- 
garn, 1899. 

Spanish Literature in the England of the Tudors. By John 
Garrett Underhill, 1899. 

Romances of Roguery. By Frank Wadleigh Chandler, 1899. 

The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages. By Henry 
Osborn Taylor, 1901. 

The Italian Renaissance in England. By Lewis Einstein, 
1902. Illustrated. 

Platonism in English Poetry. By John Smith Harrison, 
1903. 

Irish Life in Irish Fiction. By Horatio Sheafe Krans, 1903. 

The English Heroic Play. By Lewis Nathaniel Chase, 1903. 



[72] 






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